


These days are all gone now but some things remain

by jessikast



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Adam grows up, Antichrist, Future Fic, Gen, Mary Hodges is a BAMF businesswoman, Sort-of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-22 06:15:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19661515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessikast/pseuds/jessikast
Summary: “Will he remember me?”, Sister Mary Loquacious had wondered. “Pray that he doesn’t,” had been the forbidding reply.As a matter of fact, Adam does remember Mary Hodges, for the very simple reason that hers was the first kind voice he heard in his life.





	These days are all gone now but some things remain

**Author's Note:**

> Part head-canon, part fic, all unbetaed.

_“Will he remember me?”_ , Sister Mary Loquacious had wondered. _“Pray that he doesn’t,”_ had been the forbidding reply.

As a matter of fact, Adam _does_ remember Mary Hodges, for the very simple reason that hers was the first kind voice he heard in his life. (It’s not really a conscious memory, even baby Adversaries aren’t set up to comprehend and form long-term memories. But, a baby Adversary _is_ primed to be influenced, and some things make an impression.)

It must be remembered that the first voices Adam had heard were:

  1. The hosts of Hell. The less said about those infernal dissonances, the better.
  2. Hastur and Ligur. Obviously, hardly maternal types.
  3. The first vaguely pleasant voice the infant Antichrist had heard, but it hadn’t actually spoken _to_ him, and was rather distracted by swearing a lot.
  4. His father – his real _human_ father. Vaguely the baby had understood that, even nervous and excited by impending fatherhood, _this_ was a voice to be relied on. A boy could do a lot worse than to have a father with that voice.
  5. Sister Mary Loquacious. Who had smiled at the baby, and cooed, and didn’t seem to really mind that he didn’t have hoofie-woofies or a little tail or anything like that. Following the edict of her order to always speak what was on her mind, she had kept up a light chatter to the baby as she carried it to Room 3 and placed it in the crib. Light little nothings, suitable for her dark Lord-to-Be, about how he was going to grow up so wonderfully terrible, and didn’t he have _dear_ little fingernails, and he was going to have such fun leading all the demons to war, and wasn’t that new-baby smell just lovely, if a little sulphurish in this case, but she didn’t really mind because he was such a little poppet, yes he was!



In any case, when Adam met Mary Hodges many years later, he was immediately inclined to like her. Being liked by Adam was still a powerful thing; even if he didn’t have reality-bending powers (well, not ones he used consciously. Much.) he still drew people to him. People just _liked_ Adam. They wanted to follow him and hear what he had to say and do what they could to make him happy.

Most teenagers would have allowed this to go to their heads, and could have become very unpleasant indeed. Luckily Adam had two things going for him: he still remembered, with brutal clarity, what it was like when some people did try to make him happy; and his parents. Having parents who loved you through-and-through but still expected you to help with the dishes and clean the car and visit Nana every second weekend – well, it was tremendously grounding, and Adam was unusually grateful for it all in a way most teenage boys wouldn’t have been.

When Adam was sixteen, his school did the usual careers thing. What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up? they asked, and then promptly sent all the students out to find a job for the day, which was never something they _actually_ wanted to do and usually ended up being the filing in their parents’ offices.

Adam had called up the Tadfield Manor Conference and Management Training Centre, on the logic that it had a really big garden and he thought he could take Dog with him. Mary Hodges had never quite integrated into Tadfield life enough to know to be wary of the Them, and – having become a ruthlessly practical kind of person – was happy enough at the prospect of free labour for a day.

Adam had had some idea that Management Training was tremendously boring, and hadn’t held out much hope of actually having any kind of fun. He was, therefore, pleasantly surprised that it was all about grown-ups playing games and having fun and having pretend battles, and just using the right buzzwords to justify it all to themselves.

Mary Hodges had a finely honed ability to identify resources, and after the third time Adam popped his head out from filing corporate enquiry forms with ideas for “a really _brilliant_ game”, she started to listen. The fourth time, she took notes. The fifth time, she offered Adam a part-time job developing Personalised Scenarios and Strategies for businessmen (and women) who really would enjoy dressing up as space rangers or cowboys, if they only had a serious-enough training activity to give them an excuse.

Adam thought about it for a minute. Deep down, something in him bridled at the idea of having something so prosaic as a _job_. That would seriously cut into valuable the Them time, plus the growing awareness of opportunities that were on offer for sixteen-year-olds around having weekends and Friday evenings free for an entirely different class of _hanging out_.

On the other hand, Brian had an afterschool job at the grocers, and the allure of money was quickly making itself known. Imagination was all well and good, but having a few pounds in your pocket that you’d earned yourself, and didn’t have to ask for pocket money from Mum and Dad…well, that was an interesting idea. Plus, this was getting paid for coming up with _games_ and telling people what to do.

“All right,” Adam said. “But only if you give Dog a job too. He can catch rats in the outbuildings. And you can pay him in bones.”

“Agreed,” said Mary, who had been wanting to find an ecologically friendly (all the businesses looked for sustainability these days) solution to the rodents who occupied the smaller outbuildings. They shook on it.

“It’s funny, though” mused Adam as get got ready to leave and bicycle home. “I was actually born here when it was a hospital, with nuns and everything.”

“Oh, really!” said Mary. “You know, I was one of those nuns! Chattering Order of St. Beryl. What’s your surname, I wonder if I was around when you were born?”

“Young,” said Adam, and the bottom of Mary’s stomach swooped a bit. Surely it was a fairly common name…? “Dad always tells this funny story about a nun who told him the biscuits were cookies and wanted to know all about _Luton_ , and she actually suggested my name and….Ms Hodges, are you quite all right?”

“Yes…yes, quite,” said Mary, faintly. Oh, _dear_. “I think that might have been me, actually. Ha ha, what a funny old world it is! Didn’t you grow up…well!” (How does one politely ask if someone is harbouring any desires to reduce the world to ashes, crush humanity under their heel, and have dominion over the ruined seas and skies that remain? Neither Mary’s experiences as a chattering nun or corporate trainer had given her the conversational skills equal to the task.)

Adam grinned brightly at her. “That’s grand, that is. I always thought the nuns must have been kind, for some reason. Well, it’s very nice to meet you again! I’ll have to tell Mum and Dad, they’ll have a laugh.”

“Of course,” Mary agreed weakly. He seemed so _normal_. Maybe it wasn’t really him after all? Those hopes were dashed a moment later.

“And I’ll have to tell my friend Mr Crowley, he told me that the Satanic nuns never did anything worth doing, but I think he’d think this whole thing-“ a handwave encompassed the whole of the Manor and the very profitable business there “-would be quite funny.”

“Mr…Mr Crowley, of course,” agreed Mary. “He, um, he visited the hospital once. Right around when you were born. Did he ever tell you….” (She was too confounded to be able to challenge the _Satanic_ nuns thing. Adam, for whom several things were slotting in to place, most certainly noticed. He’d never had the full story of his delivery, but he’d figured it out from comments over the years.)

“Not really,” said Adam, “but I picked things up here and there.” He looked at Mary shrewdly for a moment, with some of that insight that was older than his years. Very few people actually knew who he really was. His friends had forgotten to remember, Anathema and Newt were a little better but remembered him for the ‘saving the world’ bit rather than the ‘being primed to destroy it in the first place’, and Mr Fell and Mr Crowley were…operating on a different scale to the rest of them. There was a combination of fear and incipient worship in Mary’s expression – even if she wasn’t a Satanic nun any more, she had spent most of her life getting ready to worship Adam, and old habits die hard.

Adam found that he didn’t like it. He was abruptly gladder than usual things had gone different. All the same, given that he liked Mary he didn’t really want to just fuzz her memory a little.

Mary was trying to remember proper terms of address (was it _Great Beast_ of the Bottomless Pit?) or decide if she should be offering the Antichrist a better hourly rate. She was slightly startled, therefore, when Adam offered his hand for a shake, accepting it automatically as he leaned in closer to her, with one of his rare, genuinely sweet smiles. “Thank you, Sister Mary,” murmured the Adversary, Destroyer of No Kings Whatsoever, Grubby Sometimes-Angel of Hogback Wood, Great Human that is called Adam Young, Prince of Tadfield. “It all turned out okay in the end.”

“…really?” said Mary. “Oh! Well, I’m glad to hear that. And…it’s nice to see you again after all these years. It really is. You seem to be a very nice young man.” The thing was, she genuinely meant every word.

This was why Adam liked Mary. She was _kind_.

And why, having decided that he liked her, and having discovered that there was actually a rather fun job for an imaginative young man who enjoyed coming up with increasingly bonkers (but always, somehow, entirely appropriate) management training games, Tadfield Manor Conference and Management Training Centre went from being just the preeminent corporate training centre on that side of London to the most exclusive in Britain. By the time Adam left the business for a career in politics he was leaving Mary Hodges happily in charge of an entire management training empire.

Dog kept his part-time job at the Manor. There wasn’t a lot of scope for a ratchatcher in politics. Well. Not the same kind as Dog was, anyway. Besides, once Mary understood that Dog was the kind of animal that appreciated someone saying a Satanic Grace over his bones, he thought his situation pretty much perfect.


End file.
